Catch the Wind

Minnesota's wind-power industry is picking up speed.

By Mary Hoff Photography by Michael Petersen

The sight could well make you feel as though you've awakened in a surrealistic world - one in which past, present, and future have been cut up and pasted together into a single scene, like those collages schoolchildren make for book reports and social studies projects. At your feet, fat-leaved soybeans stand in tidy, timeless rows. Above, the achingly blue sky, interrupted here and there by scudding clouds, stretches from horizon to horizon. Connecting the two are hundreds - count 'em, hundreds - of skyscraping white towers, each standing 10 times as tall as the faded farmhouse on the side of the road, each holding aloft a gigantic propellerlike device turning cartwheels in the wind.